INTRODUCTION 1

You are told that to many he was only a local poet, a party who
rhymed in dialecta kind of beggar at Apollos gate ;
and you are told by academic personsthings made after
supper at the Muses table out of a melon rindthat he was
one affected and unskilled in letters. You are told, too, that to a
friend who feigned to condole with him for that his name was not
found in a certain list of minor poets, " Perhaps," he said"
perhaps I am among the majors." A major poet ? Tis a
magnificent assumption, a Great Perhaps indeed ; yet to read this
Complete Edition of his verse is to be with him in it heart and soul.
I knew it all before ; and I have taken it all again ; and I
will avow my conviction that when I wrote of it as " the fullest
expression of life " we of these late years have been privileged to
consider and enjoy, I stated a case so baldly and so niggardly that
my statement clamours for enhancement. The Letters have shown
what manner of man Brown was how personal, how many-sided ; how
humorous and how passionate ; how rich in sentiment, yet how
abounding in farce ; how brilliantly and variously lettered,
and how in-alterably humane ; how strong in discipline, how
quick with the defensive spirit, yet how riotously accidental, how
beautifully unpedantic. Well, to state that that particular Brown
unpacked his heart in words, and here they areto state this, I
say, should be enough for all them that have the sense of character
and the right delight in letters. Brown was ever so many things :
scholar, talker, mimic, fctrceur, preacher, teacher,
schoolmaster, musician, lover of nature, lover of man. Yet of his
very essence, before all these differences, before the talker and the
mimic even, there was the man of letters, there was the artist in
style. To his father (so he tells you) style was like the instinct of
personal cleanliness. To himself it was that and some-thing more : it
was his best birthright, the master-jewel in his inheritance. To
think of him beggared of any one or two of his many gifts is hard. To
think of him without his literary faculty is impossible. And this
hook of his is one long, triumphing proof of it.

The contents fall naturally into two parts. On the one hand are
the verses in English : they are models of English verse. On the
other are the poems in dialect ; and of them it is not too much to
say that they are unique. The great exemplar is Burns, whose
achievement is a culmination, and whose genius as it were focusses
the vocal talent of a race. But I think it could be shown, and shown
easily, that there is nothing to compare in Burns to the wealth of
life and humour and fancy that is packed into these
Focsle Yarns of Browns ; while in the
matter of style, the sovran quality, the Manxman, with his immense
vocabulary, his notable feeling for expression, his all-round
training, his high and fine sense of literaturethe Manxman, I
say, had nothing to learn of the Scot. Burns, however, has his
tradition, and his tradition is over a century old ; while Brown is
even of them that died o Wednesday, and his tradition, which he
created, is all in front of him ; so that tis idle, on the face
of it, to sketch comparisons between the two. But, to place a good
thing, one cannot but approach the best ; and in Browns case,
far more than in most others, none but the best will serve. For the
rest, my appeal to Burns will, I doubt not, move many to laughter in
these days, and many to wrath. That is in the nature of things. Fifty
years hence the comparison will seem less arbitrary than now, and the
conclusion will certainly be held not nearly so impavid as it reads
to-day.

In any event here is a poet who is also a man, and who writes,
whether in fine English or in the " asynartete octosyllables " of Tom
Baynes, like a master : so that his work, whether in English or in
Manx, should go straight to the brain and heart of everybody that
loves good poetry. That it will do so at once I do not for one moment
believe. The manner is too personal, the man too instant, too intent
on himself and on what he has to say, too violent, and also too
clean-spoken, too curiously set on having nothing dubitable in his
utterance. At a first glance he has a kind of likeness to Browning.
But come to intimacy, and the shadow flees, the likeness dislimns :
you find that the one man does, where the other man has but feigned
; that books and life have been to the one what books alone
were to the other ; that the one knew and postulated, while the other
curious, eager, irrelevant for the most part, largely
inarticulateonly groped and fumbled after knowledge, and was
content to fumble and grope in speech as he had done before in idea.
All the same, there remains a like-ness ; and, time and again, in
reading Brown you come upon a fancy, an image, half-beautiful and
half-grotesque, but realisedrealised to the last dowle on the
feather, so to say :

This sea was Lazarus, all day
At Dives gate he lay,
And lapped the crumbs . .
Night comes;
The beggar dies:
Forthwith the Channel, coast to coast,
Is Abrahams bosom, and the beggar lies
A lovely ghost

till. you rub your eyes as you read, and think :" Hullo!
heres Browning doing itbut doing it doing it as he
never did it before ! " As to their gospel, it is substantially the
same. But Browning preaches it, even "local-preaches" it : as in
Rabbi Ben Ezra, and Cleon, and that Death in the
Desert in which he seeksa strange ambition, surely to
convert Straussor is it Renan ?to the turn of thought and
the way of belief of good, fair-living, high-thinking Clapham.
Browns, on the other hand, is blazoned or implied in all he
does ; and in all he does the Teacher and the Poet are one.
Tis a true mans optimism that bears him up and through
and on : there is nothing servile about it, nothing parsonical, nor
spasmic, nor pot-valiant. He lives and does and suffersah, how
he suffers 2 But if there be wailing and gnashing of
teeth, there is always the man behind ; and in the man there is
always the optimist: and the lesson to be learned from both is
constant and unchanging. As for Tennyson, he imitates that unrivalled
writer of verses a little languidly, a little distantly, in Bella
Gorry. But when, when can we imagine our unrivalled
writer of verses telling such a story as Bella Gorrys? Having
all his work before us, the answer is easy. Tennyson could never have
told us such a story, because, in despite of Rizpah, he was
never interestednot really interested in maternity, but
only in the processes, charming or not, by which maternity becomes
possible. Brown, however, has done the thing" Nursing the baby
! " So Parson Gale for all time ;and has done it in
verse which in its languid intolerance of difficulties is, while
entirely self-sufficing, by no means a bad criticism of
Tennysons own. That for the larger lines, the big outward
semblances. When it comes to comparisons, achievements, intricacies,
I think there is scarce one alive (so besotted am I in my view of the
reading Briton ! )I think there is scarce one alive who reads
verse habitually, and knows the difference between truth and
falsehood, that will prefer Browns Chalse
a Killeybefore the old, thrice-laurelled
Laureates May Queen. And yet and yet ! Tennyson
makes a pretty, sentimental picture, and runs you on a May Queen that
never could have been in any circumstances regnant on this globe.
Brown, on the other hand, takes his Chalse, and carries him through
all sorts of strange, ridiculous experiences :

And I did play upon a comb

and makes you love and pity him long or you are done with the
verse in which he s celebrate. Surely in the presence of such a
brave, pathetic reality the May Queen, with Robin, and the
silver-haired parson, and the garden-tools (" upon the
grannary floor "), even the matchless touches of dumb nature
:

When from the dry dark wold the summer
airs blow cool
On the oat-grass, and the sword-grass, and the bulirush in the
pool

surely these are nothing ? I am speaking still of Browns
English verses. But if I turn to dialect, and bring out the Mater
Dolorosa, where, I ask, is Tennyson then? Tis
but thirty to forty lines of half-Manx, half-English speech : the
wail of a woman with her true time gone for nothing, and her weary
womb, and her baffled breast clamantclamant ! Yet outside this
book of Browns I look for its like in vain.

He loved to live. It was good to him to be alive, and to steep
himself in life as it was revealed to him in the breathing, sentient,
passionate environment of which he was the centre. There is scarce
one of these English poems of his but is the cry of a living man.
However strait and severe the form, the soul of it tingles and throbs
with being ; and where the utterance is personalas in the
Epistola, and Aber Stations, and the Sunset at
Chagford the effect is perdurably and essentially poignant.
There are moments, indeed, when that odd confession of his : " I am a
born sobber " : recurs to the mind with an insistence that is not
wholly agreeable : when you pause to wonder to what heights of
self-revelation he might not have risen had he not been the artist,
above all the humorist, he was. I believe that, in his heart of
hearts, he was not averse from " wallowing naked in the pathetic "
; but I am sure that, if this were so, his inexhaustible
humour, his fine sense of things as they are, that solemn and
chastened joy in the Abstract Fool which he confesses that he had,
his abounding humanity, his unending interest in the comedy of life
these kept him straight. And thus it was that, if times there
came when he let himself go, and made as if he heat out his heart
against the wires of the cage in which, by Gods will (that was
an essential in his theory of the world), he was cabined, he was
never so lost to good literary manners that the glimpse of a
landscape, or the conscious-ness of a character, could not, and did
not, call him back to his greater and better self. Man and nature,
nature and man, romantically and humorously considered : these were
the two elements in the scene in which he exulted with a right sense
of mastery. And it is to note that he selected neither, but took them
both as they caine to him, like the faithful, all-accepting optimist
he was. God had made things so, and therefore things were to be taken
and treated as God made them : the rough with the smooth, storm with
shine, the harlot with the maid, what ought to be but isnt with
what neednt have been but is. Hence, I take it, his
indefatigable interest, whether humorous or tragic, in the thing
called character. He wanted it, anyhow and anywhere. But he preferred
it as it is : not altogether good nor altogether bad. If he light on
a kind of saintas in Parson Galehe does him all the
honour he can ; but all the reverence he shows for Parson Gale, and
all the delight he has in Parson Gale, do not for a moment prevent
him from telling the squalid underside of the Parsons life with
Mrs. Gale (Christmas Rose). It is just this blessed gift of
seeing people as they are, and not as they ought to be, which makes
Brown the man of men, and so the poet among poets, that he is. Take
Peggys
Wedding, for instance, and you will ee at once
that it is imitated from Swift ; 3 but you will also see,
if you have any taste of letters in you, that it is infinitely better
art than Swifts, in that it gives you, with a touch of primal
farce, but with not so much as the hint of a departure from the big
lines of human nature, two characters whom you have never met before,
but whom you will know to your dying day. And that sequence of
portraitures called In The
Coachis there anything like them elsewhere ? And
is there any fault to find with them for what they are ? And the
Mater Dolorosathepoor, half-articulate creature,
with her frustrated instinct, and her aching bosom, and her reeling
brainwho is there, as I said before, that has done the like for
us ? Not Tennyson, or he had been an even greater poet than he was
;and not Browning, or he d have reeled you off some
fifty pages of blank verse, with a cry or two here and there, and a
dagger, or a bowl, to wind up withal. Societies would certainly have
raged together over the discrepancy between what the heroine said and
what her historian obviously intended to have it thought she meant ;
and, about these high matters, we might, were the poet still
alive,4 be fighting, fighting evermore. That, though, is
not Browns way. He does not sit himself down to writeor,
rather, half-writethe facts, and all the facts that develop
from them, and all the developments from those developments, as
nearly exhibited as an imperfect articulation, and a flux of words
and fancies, and a partial under-standing of the central
circumstance, and a puzzle-headed theory of art, will permit. Not a
bit of it. Forty lines or so, and his effect is complete. He
deals with nothing but essentials ; and his Mater Dolorosa
is an achievement apart in our various and noble literature. That
it is the result of " wallowing " as aforesaid may be cheerfully
conceded. Stevenson did not so wallow : knowing his own talent as he
knew itand he knew it as a runner knows his pace, or a
cricketer his best hithe was certainly right. But Shakespeare
did ; so did Dickens ; so did Scott. And I conceive that
Brown, could we but come at him now, would far rather sin with
theseScott, Dickens, Shakespearethan be saved with
Stevenson.

The moral of this, however, is irrelevant : is only polemic,
literary polemicpolemic, that is, which is found at the end to
have its source, its roots, its " strong foundations " in the quality
called taste, and is therefore a thing disputable by everybody
who does not happen to see eye to eye, or rather to feel stomach and
stomach, with the original opinionist. In the circumstances it is
better to go on with the consideration of Brown the poet, and
especially the poet of Focsle Yarns, the
rough-and-ready verses,5 into which he expressed, not
merely all the Manxman in him hut also, all his humour, all his
passionate love of nature, all his unrivalled interest in character,
all his theory of life and the World and Time, and therewith as much
of the experience and the results, observed and apprehended, of his
long and varied and peculiar life as the number of lines he wrote
would hold. It is in some sort to their disadvantage that they are
written in dialect ; for the public which reads verse is easily
frightened from its purpose, and had far liefer read plain English
than (let us say) good Scots : so that, other qualities apart,
Burnseven Burns! can never capture nor control in any
latitude south of his own midden a fortieth, even a five-hundredth,
part of that publicmany-mooded, indiscriminating,
fulsomewhich is as it were the natural inheritance of Byron, or
Tennyson, or even Keats. And the worst is, that Brown being a
convinced and resolute artist, the public gets no help from him. He
does not write Manx as Barnes wrote Dorsetese: he does not, that is,
write English verses with a local accent, but otherwise with " two
gowns and everything handsome about them." On the contrary, his
syntax and his prosody are the Islands own, and he will bate
you no ace of her claim to be heard on her own peculiar conditions in
her own especial terms. Barnes, I take it, wrote in English, and
added the local accent (as, by the way, at times did Burns) ;so that, if you feel not equal to an encounter with his
rustichis so-called rusticMuse, you have but to bid her
change her shoes and stockings, and get out of those pinners, and the
like, and she falls at once to her native tongue, which is clean
Wordsworthian English. Browns Tom Baynes" Old salt, old
rip, old friend ! "is not at all like this. In his use of
ManxEnglish he is just as much Manx and just as little English as his
author : who, indeed, invented him as a sort of escape-pipe for the
mingled steam of English and Manx which was constantly generating in
his own boiler. The effect is as remarkable as I know in verse ;
and I see no earthly reason why that select and careful public,
which is addicted to the reading of verse, should not put in its
spoon and sup with the best of us. The dialect is, no doubt, an
hindrance and an offence. But, after all, a dialect is soon mastered
; and once you realise that " priddhas " = potatoes, that "
pin-jane " = curds and whey, that " arrim " and " gorrim " are
only localisms for at him and got him, that " at " is a
kind of preposition-of-all-work, and means at or by or
about, exactly as the speaker wills, there is little indeed in
Brown the Manxman to keep you at a halt. And there are such worlds to
bring you on!

Open the Yarns where you will, it matters not : the book
being the Yarns, you are ever assured of some matchless
expression of somethinga bee in a flower, an easy pipe, a night
in the cells, a sailors home, a fugue of Bachs, a man in
drink, a woman in love, white witchcraft and black, the pool at
Bethesda, a storm at sea, a carted harlot, a summer dawn, a milking,
a local genius, a perfect priest-que sçays-je
~ The Yarns are rich as life itself in character,
emotion, experience, tragedy, farce, comedy, fact ; and there is none
of their innumerable details but is presented with an assurance, an
understanding of essentials, a mastery of means that stamp its
presentation as literature. As for poetry, what is poetry ? " The
only words in the only order " ? So be it. Apply the test to these
Focsle Yarns, and you will find at once
that, given the dialect, they also are poetry, and poetry of the
great, authentic strain. Tis small wonder to me that he who
made them believed that they would triumph in the end. He thought
they would nourish and enkindle and bring on the great Manx poet. I
do not agree with him. I also believe in them ; but I believe in them
for themselves. We may be wrong : he, the master, I, the
pupilwe may both be wrong. What is certain is that if the great
Manx poet ever come along, here is as rare and fortifying a compost
for him to nuzzle his genius in as poet ever had.

After all, though, talking about Brown the poet is use-less. There
is nothing for it but reading him : in his English, first,
certainlyin all his heights and deeps, in all his brilliancies
and in all his " wallowings." High or low, radiant or despondent,
here is a poet. You love the style, or you do not ; but here is a
poet  a poet in English. And next is what I think the best of
all the Browns we havethe Brown of the Manx things and the
Yarns. Herein is vastly more than there is in most of the
verse written of late about peculiar neighbour-hoods, by rhymesters
of all grades of talent and accomplishment, from the departed
Laureate downwards. And the end is, simply : " Master the
dialect, and read." Master Browns dialect, such as it is, and
become a worshipper of Brown. After all, his Tom Baynes is infinitely
better and more variously lettered than most of our Laureates have
been, and has, besides, a very great deal to say that none of our
Laureates as yet has had the wit to conceive:

seeing that Tom Baynes is the most of that was written on the
heart of T. E. B. This I say with, as I think, a good working
knowledge of what was done for art and for the race by such laurelled
sons of the God as Jonson, Wordsworth, Tennyson. But, despite the
magnificent achievements of these three(the others, Dryden
excepted, scarce count)I hold that none is greater and sounder
than Browns ; that there are essentials in which all are
less than Browns. That is for the years to approve. Meanwhile,
one thing is certain : no better man has lived, and not many that
were stronger or more helpful to their kind.

W.E.H.

1 The Pall Mall Magazine, December
1900.

2 See Aber Stations , and the
thrice-admirable Epistola ad Dakyns, and the daring, the
grotesque, the wonderful and taking Dartmoor:Sunset al
Chagford (a piece he never revised for press), with many things
besides.

3 I was privileged to give it to the world : or
rather, to that tiny section of the world which read The National
Observer. And, in sending it, he quoted his model.

4 A great matter. The Master dead, your Society
resolves itself into nothingness, and you look for excitement
(intellectual or other) elsewhere,

5 So they seem. But to look carefully into their
structure, and consider the means by which they achieve their effect
is to see that they are a result of deliberate art.